ANAGRAM EFFECTS IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

P. Courrieu & M. Lequeux / Anagram Effects 8 / 40hal-00429184, version 1 - 1 Nov 2009rapidly (but later than orthographic encoding) in visual word recognition (Ziegler,Ferrand, Jacobs, Rey, & Grainger, 2000). Perea and Lupker (2004) foundanagram priming effects, in a lexical decision task, with nonadjacent transposedletters. However these effects were detectable for target words only when thetransposed letters were consonants, while transposed vowels did not providepriming for words, and provided only weak priming effects for non-words. Giventhat the distinction between consonants and vowels is of phonological nature,this suggests a possible role of a phonological coding in the processing of letterorder, however other explanations are possible in terms of a modified openbigramtheory.While most studies focused on the question of how letter order is encoded,there is little data concerning the consequences of a possible use of positionfreeletter codes (as in Neocognitrons) for lexical access, despite the suggestivefact that 91% of the words do not have lexical anagrams, in French and inEnglish as well (Deloche, Debili, & Andreewsky, 1980), and thus only 9% of thewords theoretically require the order information to be taken into account (seealso Shillcock, Ellison, & Monaghan, 2000). The present study provides somenew data concerning the hypothesis that position-free letter codes are used inlexical access. Note that the hypothesis is not that the order information is nottaken into account, but that the letter position, as additional information, is notdirectly available in letter codes, which are assumed to be translation invariant(and also invariant through some other geometrical transformations, accordingto Neocognitron models). In this framework, it is clear that the anagramrelationship, within the lexicon or between stimuli, constitutes a form oforthographic similarity whose effects on reading performance should bedetectable. However, Neocognitrons are pure visual analyzers, they do not useany orthographic constraint, and to date, no lexical stage has been